As career choices go, getting a job as a Playboy Bunny might appear to be an
unlikely step towards becoming a member of parliament.

But it emerged yesterday that the ranks of former lawyers, economists and public sectors workers who sit in Holyrood’s debating chamber also include one of Hugh Hefner’s former glamour girls.

Jean Urquhart, who recently resigned from the SNP, disclosed that she worked as a Bunny at London’s Playboy Club at the height of the Swinging Sixties.

The independent Highlands and Islands MSP said she was only 17 but lied about being 18 to get the exclusive waitressing job, which involved wearing a skimpy bunny outfit complete with ears.

“But the girls were great. One of the things about that kind of job is the great camaraderie,” the 63-year-old told Holyrood magazine.

“Some people took it really seriously and the ambition for some was to get to Chicago or wherever the original Bunny club was and while there may have been a sleazy side to it all as well, I have to say that I didn’t see that, I was just young and I was having fun.”

Ms Urquhart said the club’s managers gave the girls training and paid for them to have their hair cut but were “really strict” about who they met while at work.

However, despite Playboy’s hedonistic image, she admitted she spent more time in the cloakroom than drinking or dancing with the clientele.

“It does conjure up the image of people being really smart in their little bunny outfits, carrying trays of champagne and having god knows what kind of conversations with all these clients,” she said.

“But I have to tell you that I was at the door giving out the cloakroom tickets for coats and top hats and things. I mean I was low, low, low. I was also conscious that I never had very good legs so I was also really quite happy that I was in the cloakroom.

“I dreaded at the time that I’d have to go across the floor because I didn’t have very good ankles and I was quite self-conscious about that.”

The first Playboy Club opened in 1960, and there were dozens of branches around the world before the last one closed in 1991. However, a club reopened in 2006 in Las Vegas.

Ms Urquhart’s unlikely stint as a Bunny lasted only four weeks and was one of a series of jobs she took after moving from Scotland to London “on a whim” in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love.

She moved to Glasgow the following year, where she met her “soul mate”, the actor Robert Urquhart. The couple later moved back to his birthplace of Ullapool.

They had two children and over 40 years built up Ceilidh Place, a combination of accommodation, bar and arts venue.

Ms Urquhart was elected an MSP in last year’s SNP landslide Holyrood election victory but resigned from the party a fortnight ago over its decision to drop its opposition to an independent Scotland becoming a Nato member.